PAGE 6
Between The Millstones
by
“Air-pressure!” he exclaimed, as he shut it off. He had seen a line of bubbles rise as the thing dived. “An air-engine, and the whole thing must be full o’ compressed air. The brass lever turns it on, and if the steel blade’s up it gives it the slow motion; if it’s down, she gets full speed at once. Now I know why it’s blade-shaped. It’s so the water itself can push it down–after she starts.”
He did not try to launch it; he waited until the tide floated it, then pushed it along the beach toward his store of food, arriving at high water too exhausted to do more that day than ground his capture and break hard bread. And as the afternoon drew to a close the fatigue in his limbs became racking pain; either as a result of his exposure, or as a later symptom of the fever, he was now in the clutch of a new enemy–rheumatism.
Then, with the coming of night came a return of his first violent symptoms; he was hot, shivery, and feverish by turns, with dry tongue and throat, and a splitting headache; but in this condition he could still take cognizance of a black, ram-bowed gunboat, which stole into the bay from the east and dropped anchor near the buoys.
A half-moon shone in the western sky, and by its light the steamer presented an unkempt, broken appearance, even to the untrained eye of this castaway. Her after-funnel was but half as high as the other; there were gaps in her iron rail, and vacancies below the twisted davits where boats should be; and her pilot-house was wrecked–the starboard door and nearest window merged in a large, ragged hole.
Officers on the bridge gave orders in foreign speech, in tones which came shoreward faintly. Men sprang overboard with ropes, which they fastened to the buoys; then they swam back, and for an hour or two the whole crew was busy getting the boats to the davits and the end of the cable into the hawse-pipe.
The man on the beach recognized the craft he had seen when he wakened.
He felt that she must in some way be connected with his being there, and he waited, expecting to see a boat put off; but when both boats were hoisted and he heard the humming of a steam-windlass, he gave up this expectation and tried to hail.
His voice could not rise above a hoarse whisper. The anchor was fished, and after an interval he heard the windlass again, heaving in the other chain. They were going away–going to leave him there to die.
He crawled and stumbled down to the water’s edge. The tide was up again, rippling around the strange thing he had resolved to navigate. It was not a boat, but it would go ahead, and it would float–it would possibly float him.
With strength born of desperation and fear, he pushed it, inch by inch, into the water until it was clear of the sand, and tried the engine on the slow motion. The propellers turned and satisfied him. He shut off the power, swung the thing round until it pointed toward the steamer, and seated himself astride of it, just abaft the T-shaped projection in the middle. The long cylinder sank with him, and when it had steadied to a balance between his weight and its buoyancy he found that it bore him, shoulders out; and the position he had taken–within reach of the levers behind him–lifted the blunt nose higher than the stern, but not out of water. This was practicable.
He reached behind, raised the blade lever, threw back the large brass lever, and the craft went ahead, at about the speed of a healthy man’s walk. He kept his left hand on the blade lever to hold it up, and by skilful paddling with his right maintained his balance and assisted his legs in steering. He had never learned to swim, but he felt less fear of drowning than of slow death on the island.